Drum Recording - One Person

[Will MontgomeryParticipant]

First post.

I have a drum kit setup in my rehearsal space that I have mic'ed up and ready to record. I have good placement and decent mics. In studios I've tracked in, engineers will add a little bit of compression, specialized mic pre's and EQ when recording. Since I'm doing the tracking, I was wondering if I record everything flat at decent levels then go back after the recording and make the same minimal type adjustments I would while tracking then bounce does that make any major difference in quality?

I don't have any separate pre-amps or a UA interface, just two older Presonus 8 channel interfaces that I hook together for plenty of mic inputs on my laptop which I then bring to my office modern iMac for editing.

My intent is to provide a well recorded product for a mixer as I would do in a big studio but not color the tracks too much to allow flexibility for the mixer but not make him work too much to correct recording deficiencies.

So basically I have a "post" procedure that, if I were just the engineer and not the engineer AND the drummer, I would do while recording but am forced to do it after.

Thanks for any insight!

• This topic was modified 4 years ago by Will Montgomery.

[Magnus JohanssonParticipant]

Difference in quality. If I´m not mistaken any bounce or mixdown should have dither added unless.. you bounce to 32bit float file. People might argue that it also is not neccessary if you are not changing bit depth and or samplerate. My thought about that is... processing in daw is to my knowledge done in 32 bit float so.. unless you save to that bitdepth you are indeed changing the bitdepth, even though bitdepth of source might match the bounce.

https://youtu.be/cIQ9IXSUzuM?t=1008

[OziBattlerParticipant]

Personally, I wouldn’t bounce the tracks before giving them to another mixer. As long as you don’t clip on the way in, you will be fine. If you bounce with compression and eq, then you have committed to what you have done, which may not be to the mixer’s liking. But if you give the raw recorded file to another mixer, they will be able use whatever gear they have (outboard or plug-in) to manipulate the signal the way they want.

Even if you are doing the mix yourself, I would be doing the compression and eq as plugins on the channel rather than bouncing down. The only time I would bounce down was if I was using outboard gear that I may not always have available, or if I was getting performance issues on the computer due to too much processing.

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